Buying Amazon's 7-inch tablet? Get ready to overlook some flaws.

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Amazon landed the first real volley in the 7-inch Android device market. Sure, the initial Kindle Fire was rough around the edges, but its shockingly low $199 price tag and integration with Amazon's services won over a few (million) consumers. Amazon sold tons of Kindle Fires in December 2011, and it wasn't long before the device held the top spot on the Android hardware charts.

The Kindle Fire struck us as the perfect tablet-y gift for a close relative who has been hemming and hawing about whether to get an iPad for two years straight—here's a Kindle Fire, dad, now stop e-mailing me every week about tablets. Once the gift-giving season had passed, though, what were people going to do—buy one for themselves? Many tablet and Android enthusiasts, perhaps foreseeing the coming of Google's own tablet, the Nexus 7, stayed away.

Google didn't just create a sleek, snappy, honest-to-goodness Jelly Bean tablet; it also slapped it with the same starting $199 price tag as the chunkier, lackadaisical Kindle Fire. The Nexus 7 came out of the starting gate as a better iPad competitor than the Kindle Fire had any hope of being, and the race was over almost before it had even started.

From left: iPad 2, Kindle Fire HD, Nexus 7, iPhone 4S.

It was almost unfair to compare the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 at all, given that Google freely admitted it was selling the Nexus 7 at cost, if not at a loss. Its price point belied the value of the product, and Google was (and is) counting on its deep pockets and robust advertising-based business model to keep Android's foot in the tablet door while other hardware manufacturers attempt to re-group.

But Amazon's narrative for the Kindle Fire was never all that different from Google's. The real money wasn't in the low-margin hardware but in the high-margin banana stand of Amazon's services and digital products: apps, music, movies, books, and all the rest. With the announcement of the HD versions, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made this much more explicit, with multiple mentions about the value of Amazon's "services" and how the Kindle Fire would act as portal for that content. With this new round of Kindle Fires, Amazon has focused on improving those services, adding things like "X-Ray" to books and movies (a feature which automatically identifies actors and authors for the media you're currently viewing), improving parental controls, and offering a ton of audiobooks. But good services by themselves just aren't enough to distance it from the rest of the hungry Android pack.

Despite Amazon's presence as a huge go-to for books and its growing movie and music business, in our view the company was (and still is) underestimating the importance of the delivery vector for those services—the actual hardware. The regular e-ink Kindles may be no technological feat, but they're designed for a single task, and they're good at it. A tablet should be more like a blank slate, able to handle any of the varying tasks that developers, the Web, and media can throw at it. But Amazon continues to get in the way of Android with its own fork of the OS—an even bigger crime than before, since the custom modifications are all to Ice Cream Sandwich, which will delay, perhaps substantially, the adoption of the newer Jelly Bean on the platform.

Evaluated on its own, the Kindle Fire is a passable tablet. It's not incredibly easy to use, nor is it all that quick. It has no standout assets aside from its deep connection to the Amazon ecosystem; whether or not that's an asset to you, the customer, depends entirely on your engagement and purchase history with Amazon. With all that, it accomplishes plenty of tablet tasks adequately enough to justify its $199 price.

However, the Kindle Fire can't be evaluated purely on its own, because no device exists in a vacuum. Google laid down the 7-inch tablet law in July, and the Kindle Fire flatly does not measure up. Worse, with Apple still expected by many to announce a 7-inch-ish tablet of its own soon, the Kindle Fire could well finish a distant third in its price and size bracket before the holiday shopping season even swings into full gear.

Look, touch, feel

The first Kindle Fire had a much narrower bezel on the long sides than on the short ones, but the Kindle Fire HD fills the border out all around, as we noted in our initial hands-on with the device. This gives it a chunkier, boxier look than the first Kindle Fire or the Nexus 7. We noted how portable and book-like the Nexus 7 felt in our hands as we carried it around; due to its shape, the Kindle Fire HD feels a bit more like an iPad.

At 13.9 ounces it's not very heavy, but it weighs more than the Nexus 7's 12 ounces. Thanks to the rounded and rubberized back, the Kindle Fire HD is more comfortable to hold than its predecessor, the Kindle Fire. The power button and a volume rocker sit flush with the edge at the top of the device, between a headphone jack and one of the speakers.
Two ports, mini-HDMI and Micro USB, are planted in the center of one long side, while the microphone is embedded on the other long side, around the edge from the front-facing camera. Whether I hold it in my left or right hand, my thumb seems to find its way to the spot right over the camera's lens; I'd worry that I'm going to end up with a lot of finger-grease smeared on it, as the glass doesn't seem particularly resistant to prints.

The 1280×800 display, so important to the branding that "HD" is even in the device's name, is the same size and resolution as the screen in the Nexus 7. And a very good screen it is, with crisp text and fine edges to visual elements throughout the OS. The display uses in-plane switching (IPS) to help widen the viewing angles to great effect, and there's no noticeable lighting unevenness along any of the panel's edges. We didn't see much difference in the color profiles or display of blacks between the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD. If the screens were presented on their own, we're not sure we'd be able to tell the difference. The Kindle Fire HD's display is a bit warmer and brighter at the highest setting.

Colors on the Nexus 7, left, Kindle Fire HD, center, and iPad 2.

The Kindle Fire HD's screen also has a polarizing filter and "anti-glare technology" that Amazon made specific mention of during its presentation. We compared the Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7 in direct sunlight, and both displays were perfectly visible. Whatever new layering processes or films Amazon has used don't seem to our eyes to make any appreciable difference.

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Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston